[AusNOG] "How China diverts, then spies on Australia's internet traffic"

[Mark Smith]

On Thu, 22 Nov 2018 at 09:03, Ken Sayers <kens at acm.org> wrote:
>
> This was discussed some time ago from a North American perspective in this article.
> As I have said for years, "The internet was created in an age in innocence". As a result, the basic architecture of the network is open to exploitation.

I don't think the early Internet designers were innocent. The story
from Vint Cerf is that the NSA and friends prevented the use of
information security technology like cryptography.

"Vint Cerf wanted to make internet secure from the start, but secrecy
prevented it"
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/04/07/internet_inception_security_vint_cerf_google_hangout/


The 1974 paper on TCP (before it was split into TCP/IP, and before it
had 32 bit addresses) by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, briefly mentions the
use of encryption.

"A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication",
https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall06/cos561/papers/cerf74.pdf


Internet Engineering Notes (IENs) are early documents that were
sometimes written in parallel with early RFCs and then were eventually
replaced by RFCs. (If you get a full copy of the RFC archive, you'll
get an 'ien' directory containing the IENs). Digging through those can
tell a bit of Internet/ARPANET development history.

The earliest IEN where the term 'encrypt' occurs is IEN12, from March 1977,

"Issues in Reliable Host-to-Host Protocols"
https://www.rfc-editor.org/ien/ien12.txt

Of the around 200 IENs, the term 'encrypt' occurs more than once in 3 of them.

     16 ien113.txt, August 1980
     15 ien85.txt, March 1979
      3 ien32.txt, April 28, 1978


The earliest RFC that the term 'encrypt' occurs in is RFC610, from
December 1973.

"Further Datalanguage Design Concepts", Richard Winter, Jeffrey Hill,
Warren Greiff
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc610.txt


Of the first 1000 RFCs, 'encrypt' occurs more than once in a number of them.

     82 rfc989.txt
     44 rfc841.txt
     43 rfc806.txt
     16 rfc759.txt
     15 rfc753.txt
     11 rfc822.txt
      5 rfc942.txt
      3 rfc987.txt
      2 rfc999.txt
      2 rfc874.txt

It appearing a lot in RFC989 isn't a surprise -

"Privacy Enhancement for Internet Electronic Mail: Part I: Message
Encipherment and Authentication Procedures", February 1987
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc989.txt

One RFC that does stick out in the above list is RFC822, the SMTP
standard RFC. So SMTP was expected to support encryption from its
earliest days.

> Let's all go back to the OSI Stack!!

I don't think that would really solve anything.

Radia Perlman has said that the ISO networking standards are just ISO
versions of the Internet protocols with tweaks.

For example, "3.3.  Overview of IDRP (ISO/IEC 10747)" is a functional
description of BGP, with different, more generic (ISOfied) entity
names.

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1629#section-3.3


Regards,
Mark.

> Regards Ken Sayers
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Ken Sayers Tel: +61 414 384 010
>
>
> On Wed, 21 Nov 2018 at 17:38, Christian Heinrich <christian.heinrich at cmlh.id.au> wrote:
>>
>> Has anyone observed
>> https://www.smh.com.au/technology/how-china-diverts-then-spies-on-australia-s-internet-traffic-20181120-p50h80.html
>> or not?
>>
>> --
>> Regards,
>> Christian Heinrich
>>
>> http://cmlh.id.au/contact
>> _______________________________________________
>> AusNOG mailing list
>> AusNOG at lists.ausnog.net
>> http://lists.ausnog.net/mailman/listinfo/ausnog
>
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